Industrial unrest

“ It has grown too strong to remain within the bounds of the old industrial system and its unsatisfied demand for the reorganization of industry on democratic lines is not only the most important, but also a constantly growing cause of unrest. ”

“ A handful of social parasites hidden away in Wall street, with no other interest in the steel industry than to exploit it, settle arbitrarily the vital questions of wages, hours and working conditions, while the enormous mass of the workers, actual producers whose very lives are involved, have no say whatsoever. No matter how bitter their grievances, when they raise their voice to ask redress, they are discharged, blacklisted, starved, beaten, jailed and even shot, until they bend the knee again and yield to the will of their industrial masters. ”

“ But now our customers have set up in their own countries improved copies of our industrial organization, and have discovered places where iron and coal are even handier than they are by this time in England. They produce for themselves, or buy elsewhere, what they formerly bought from us. Our profits are vanishing, our machinery is standing idle, our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop the mills and fight and crush the unions when the men strike, no longer for an advance, but against a reduction. ”

“ And as the years went on there would be similar strikes in all trades and in all countries, until at some time not many years off there would be such labor rebellions as would paralyze the industrial world. And out of this catastrophe the workers would emerge into power to build up a strange new world of their own. ”

“ The way to fight machine guns is with machine guns or better. Only an idiot would go up against a machine gun with a bow and arrow. Yet our Labor Generals have been leading their bow-and-arrow craft-union batallions against the industrial machine guns of capitalism with disastrous results—defeat after defeat, strike after strike lost, wages slashed right and left, and the unions in retreat before the onslaughts of capital. ”

“ Let us be assured of this: the unrest in the world of industry to-day is no ephemeral and transitory affair; no mere aftermath of the hideous convulsion which has shaken existing society to its very foundations. It is the voice of a grief-stricken humanity crying for justice in the relations of industry. Let us be equally assured that the sword is not the instrument, and repression not the method, to stay this unrest. ”

“ Against this will-to-power of their employers the steel workers have fought long and valiantly. In the early days of the industry, when the combinations of capital were weak, the working force skilled, English-speaking and independent, the latter easily defended themselves and made substantial progress toward their own inevitable, even if unrecognized goal of industrial freedom ”

“ Failing to force concessions from the employers by the strike, work is resumed and “sabotage” is used to force the employers to concede the demands of the workers.
The great progress made in machine production results in an ever increasing army of unemployed. To counteract this the Industrial Workers of the World aims to establish the shorter work day, and to slow up the working pace, thus compelling the employment of more and more workers. ”

“ You, of the wage working class, of whom it was required that in one year over fourty thousand workers—men, women and children—should be killed in the industries of this nation, burned to death as in the Triangle fire of New York City, their lives snuffed out in coal mine explosions and in a thousand various ways.
The blood of these workers, it seems, was needed to grease and spur the machines in the mills of our masters. Their lives sacrificed all because human beings are cheaper than the application of safety appliances which cost money and would reduce profits ”

“ For our ability to exchange our manufactures for food will grow steadily less, as the self-indulgent and 'work-shy' labourer succeeds in gaining his wishes. If the coal begins to give out, the retreat will become a rout.
We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. ”

“ So it may happen that the hungry workers seize the factories and attempt to run them; and we shall have to make the best of it and help them to success.
In such an emergency, the social changes will be sudden and drastic; and that is the reason why I do not attempt to foretell what the new industrial forms will be. Just how the business will be managed depends in great part upon those who now have the power in their hands; they may choose either to be stubborn and brutal, or to display vision and a sense of justice, not to say of common prudence. ”

“ The mill owners are interested in profits, not in humanity. Hence, if they can prevent it, they will have no unions. Since the pioneer days of steel making their policy has tended powerfully on the one hand towards elevating the employers into a small group of enormously wealthy, idle, industrial autocrats, and on the other towards depressing the workers into a huge army of ignorant, poverty-stricken, industrial serfs. ”

“ He knew how the money from the accumulated dues was piling up in the Labor Union’s war chest in the valley. He had proved what a trade solidarity in an industrial district could do for the men without strikes by its potential strength. Black powder, which killed like the pestilence that stalketh in darkness, was gone. Electric lights had superseded torches in the runways of the mines. ”

“ The disasters resulting from industrial anarchy, from "strikes" of operatives for higher wages or fewer hours of labor, the stoppage of work by combinations if not by outright violence, arrest general attention. ”

“ Many of their factories are razed to the ground. Much of their machinery is destroyed or has been taken away. Their people are scattered and many of their best workmen are dead. Their markets will be taken by others, if they are not in some special way assisted to rebuild their factories and replace their lost instruments of manufacture. They should not be left to the vicissitudes of the sharp competition for materials and for industrial facilities which is now to set in. ”

“ The factories and workshops are idle or are ill-equipped, for materials, tools, and fuel are everywhere lacking; unemployment holds large industrial populations in destitution and despair. Even where plant and materials are present, the physical strength of the workers is so let down that efficient productivity is impossible. ”

“ The strike has already demonstrated the fact that in the hands of a well-organized body of laborers, especially in those trades where the number of apprentices may be controlled, industrial power becomes a much more effective weapon than it is in the hands of the present capitalistic owners. ”

“ The professed object of the militant branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is to take over the capital of the country by destroying the business of the employer. To this end, costly strikes are precipitated, materials and machinery wantonly damaged, the good will of the business wilfully injured, and inefficiency on the part of the workers openly encouraged and practised. ”

“ Main headquarters authorizes you to use these credits to an unlimited extent for the purpose of destroying factories, workshops, camps, and the most important centers of military and civil supply belonging to the enemy. In addition to the incitement of labor troubles, measures must be taken for the damaging of engines and machinery plants, the destruction of vessels carrying war material to enemy countries, the burning of stocks of raw materials and finished goods, and the depriving of large industrial centers of electric power, fuel and food. ”

“ The factory system brought with it oppression and misery which it would need a century of industrial revolt to overcome. The costly wars, the crushing taxation, the oppressive corn-laws, which forbade the importation of foreign corn, the extravagant expenses of the court and salaries of officials, all conspired to depress the people. Manufacturies fell into the hands of the few, and a vast number of artisans were forced to live from hand to mouth, and to labor for long hours on pinching wages. ”

“ I do not refer now to the failure of society to provide methods of industrial mediation or other adjustment of such labor difficulties. My question is, whether or not the public is at all at fault when a nation wealthy beyond all others [Pg 5] in coal finds itself with so small a supply on hand when a strike comes—but a few days removed from the gravest troubles. ”

“ Other results are—deranged markets, uncertainty in manufacturing enterprises and agriculture, precarious and intermittent employment for the laborer, industrial war, increasing pauperism and crime, and the consequent intimidation and disfranchisement of the producer, and a rapid declension into corporate feudalism. ”

“ The results of these strikes in decreasing the purchasing power of employés and thus causing overproduction, and in discouraging enterprise and increasing the cost of capital, serve to spread their effect throughout the whole industrial community and thus cause an actual loss and injury many times that borne by the parties directly engaged. ”

“ This, together with the inflammatory utterances of the strikers themselves, convinced the public that the strike was not what it claimed to be, an effort to get260 fair wages and improved living conditions for the workers—the American workers who remained at their posts insisted that they already had these and the evidence adduced by the steel companies verified the statement—but an attempt to deliver the steel mills and factories into the hands of the radical foreign element among our industrial workers. ”

“ This unrest was fostered and seized upon by radical leaders everywhere to further their own ambitions, their object being the overthrow of capital, the nationalization of industry, and their own aggrandizement. ”

“ THE COST OF INDUSTRIAL WARFARE.—The struggles of labor against capital constitute a species of warfare which involves the general public. Regardless of whether a particular dispute ends in favor of the laborers or the employer, every strike, lockout, or other interference with industrial co÷peration lessens the amount of consumable goods in existence. Thus aside from the fact that industrial warfare encourages class antagonisms, it is an important cause of the relative scarcity of goods, and the resulting tendency of prices to rise. ”

“ Under the effect of such false arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the Industrial System were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the blast furnace and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed. ”

“ Added to which evil comes the still greater one—an extensive damage to the organization of society. Numerous importing, producing, and distributing establishments are swept away; tens of thousands of their dependents are left without work; and before the industrial fabric can be repaired, a long time must elapse, much labour must lie idle, and great distress be borne. ”

“ Even though they succeed in their revolution, they surely cannot do it without industrial waste. They will have to stop the machines while they are fighting; they may shoot holes in the factories, and even burn some of them down. And just what will that cost? We are reckoning, you understand, on our possible double production—forty billions a year. The interest we pay the owners is five billions a year. So now:
If in the course of our revolution we destroy one-eighth of our industrial plant, it would have been cheaper to pay the owners for the whole thing. ”

“ If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment,—to feed them by the labour of others,—to move them and provide them with destructive machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost ”

“ Panics have, moreover, arisen among the workmen of the manufacturing classes, as if the machinery were about to rob them of their daily labor, whence their daily bread; and the consequences have been, especially in the large English manufacturing towns, fearful riots, conflagrations of mills and factories, destruction of much valuable machinery, the ruin of owners and employers, and—as a natural consequence of the cause last named—stagnation in business, deterioration of the laborer’s condition, and actual loss of life. ”

“ In all branches of human labor, in all phases of human ingenuity, for above half a century, this vast increase—both of the application and the power of machinery—has been in progress; constantly awakening the fears and jealousies, sometimes inducing the overt opposition and illegal violence of the working classes, as cheapening their labor, and about ultimately to subvert their trade and destroy their means of subsistence. ”

“ Considering the hostile attitude of the majority of the capitalist class toward the Revolution, experience shows that proper distribution of raw materials and fuel, as well as the most efficient management of factories, is impossible without Workers’ Control. ”

“ Are not our deposits of coal and iron immeasurably greater, our mills more highly developed, our labor force more numerous and more skilled than those of any other country? Who then will venture to assert that American workingmen are not entitled to exercise all the rights and privileges enjoyed by European workingmen? If the steel workers of England, or France, or Italy, or Germany can practice collective bargaining, why not the steel workers of America? And why should the steel workers here have to work twelve hours daily when the eight hour day obtains abroad? ”